Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/135

which, when externally observed, seem to agree, still any such linkage, where it exists, is no part of the essential nature, i.e. of the mere definition, either of your object in so far as it is real, or of your knowledge in so far as it consists of mere ideas. If your knowledge is true, is sound, is valid, it is indeed such as somehow to agree with the object. In other words, ideas depend for their truth upon objects. But then false opinion is just as possible in a realistic world as is truth. You cannot tell by examining a “mere idea” as an idea in a realistic world, whether its real object is or is not, any more than you can tell by merely considering an object, whether any particular idea external to that object does or does not rightly represent it. That is why a realist has to reject with Kant the well-known ontological proof for God’s existence. God’s existence cannot be proved from any mere idea about God. No “mere idea” is, as such, essentially linked to its independent object. The that in a realistic world never follows from the mere what. Nothing has real being merely by virtue of the fact that it is conceived by any knower. Conversely, nothing is conceived in idea merely by virtue of the mere fact that it is real. If, then, idea and object are linked, by ties of causation, or by the mere fact that the idea happens to be true, then such linkage, for a realist, is another fact, namely, just the fact that the causal connection itself exists, or that the idea, by good fortune, is true of its object. A cat may look at a king; and hereupon both cat and king may be viewed by a student of psychology or physics as facts in the interdependent world of space and time. But the cat’s looking, viewed as knowledge,